Hailong Wang

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, posing significant security threats to their deployment in remote sensing applications. Research on adversarial attacks not only reveals model vulnerabilities but also provides critical insights for enhancing robustness. Although current mixing-based strategies have been proposed to increase the transferability of adversarial examples, they either perform global blending or directly exchange a region in the images, which may destroy global semantic features and mislead the optimization of adversarial examples. Furthermore, their reliance on cross-entropy loss for perturbation optimization leads to gradient diminishing during iterative updates, compromising adversarial example quality. To address these limitations, we focus on non-targeted attacks and propose a novel framework via local mixing and logits optimization. First, we present a local mixing strategy to generate diverse yet semantically consistent inputs. Different from MixUp, which globally blends two images, and MixCut, which stitches images together, our method merely blends local regions to preserve global semantic information. Second, we adapt the logit loss from targeted attacks to non-targeted scenarios, mitigating the gradient vanishing problem of cross-entropy loss. Third, a perturbation smoothing loss is applied to suppress high-frequency noise and enhance transferability. Extensive experiments on FGSCR-42 and MTARSI datasets demonstrate superior performance over 12 state-of-the-art methods across 6 surrogate models. Notably, with ResNet as the surrogate on MTARSI, our method achieves a 17.28% average improvement in black-box attack success rate.

Current ship detection techniques based on remote sensing imagery primarily rely on the object detection capabilities of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial patch attacks, which can lead to misclassification by the detection model or complete evasion of the targets. Numerous studies have demonstrated that data transformation-based methods can improve the transferability of adversarial examples. However, excessive augmentation of image backgrounds or irrelevant regions may introduce unnecessary interference, resulting in false detections of the object detection model. These errors are not caused by the adversarial patches themselves but rather by the over-augmentation of background and non-target areas. This paper proposes a localized augmentation method that applies augmentation only to the target regions, avoiding any influence on non-target areas. By reducing background interference, this approach enables the loss function to focus more directly on the impact of the adversarial patch on the detection model, thereby improving the attack success rate. Experiments conducted on the HRSC2016 dataset demonstrate that the proposed method effectively increases the success rate of adversarial patch attacks and enhances their transferability.